Wednesday, December 23, 2009

I saw this last night on Gawker and rolled my eyes at it before going to bed. For some reason, it was the first thing I thought of when I turned on my laptop this morning, and I watched it again with a rising sense of, frankly, amazement. Perhaps I was too tired when I saw it the first time.

In this video, a caller and teabagging enthusiast asks Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) why Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) wasn't able to attend the health care vote.

Now, this guy starts openly weeping on the phone because he thinks that he or Barrasso have killed Inhofe. Why? Because Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) got on the floor of the senate and urged all Republicans to pray that certain people would be incapable of attending the health care vote, that God would somehow prevent them. The implication in Coburn's prayer was pretty clear, as the very ill and 92-year-old Robert Byrd (D-WV) was expected to cast the filibuster-proof 60th vote for the health care bill. Thus, Coburn's exhortation was little more than the Christian dog-whistle equivalent of asking God to kill Byrd for Republicans, babies and America — a less overt version of Pat Robertson praying that God start killing Supreme Court justices so George Bush could replace them with religious conservative appointees.
The whole clip is barely a minute long, but it's absolutely captivating television. This man is openly weeping, not because he asked a merciful and loving God to murder another person for a political victory, but apparently because he thinks that Senator Barrasso failed to pray hard enough, or that he himself failed to pray hard enough, or perhaps that his omnipotent and all-knowing God somehow got the wrong signal at the end of the God Switchboard — like he shook his God Cell Phone as it garbled, stared at it, furrowed his brow, then said, "Well, I'm God and all, but how the hell am I going to figure out what he just said? I know—fuck it—I'm gonna kill Inhofe."

God is a vicious, impatient and intercessory God. The New Testament never happened. God waits by the blower eternal, ready for the impious to be smitten, brought low and then completely fucked up. Any day now he'll get a misdirected prayer letter from 1993 and turn Hillary Clinton into a pillar of salt, her useless barren womb snowing pure white grains out her crotch and forming a mountain in front of her like she's got a uterine Tony Montana working the bellows somewhere in the pit of her stomach. God hates fags. God hates Democrats. God has watched every John Mellencamp "This Is Our Country" Chevy Silverado ad and is even now making an executive's finger hover over an office telephone button, ready to commission more. God thinks Mexican food sucks everywhere outside of Texas, including Mexico.

And the best part of all — despite the fact that Byrd is alive, was wheeled into the senate at 1:00 a.m. with a runny nose, rheumy eyes and a handkerchief before casting the 60th "aye" vote and literally fist-pumping while he did it — is the righteous and emotional investment the man has in an ethos he clearly knows nothing about. He cares enough about America and about Christianity to weep openly about them and to pray intensely without ever connecting a health care bill with lessons that Christ taught about healing the sick, a rich man's limitations, the meek's inheritance or the goodness of surrendering material wealth for the enrichment of all. He's managed to internalize his belief strongly enough to sob about it on national television while giving the whole mercy/tolerance/cheek-turning thing a complete pass. In the season of peace, honoring the birth of a God-made-man who raised his hand to no one and instead chose to die to save us all, this caller chokes up with impotent despair that his plans to kill another fucking human being went awry.

The sad thing, of course, is that perhaps this man would have learned what's wrong with this kind of thinking if only my people hadn't so successfully prosecuted our War on Christmas. Our insistence on acknowledging that other religions celebrate things in winter has made it impossible for even Christians to remember what it is they allegedly believe in.

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For an update to this topic, concerning the fallout from the possibility that this is a hoax, please click here.

5 comments:

great post. i wonder though if that was a fake phone call, it seemed a little forced and the caller used the word 'teabag group' instead of 'tea party group'. the former is favored by lefties and satirists.

"...lessons that Christ taught about healing the sick, a rich man's limitations, the meek's inheritance or the goodness of surrendering material wealth for the enrichment of all".

Um. Well, what Christ did with the sick was rather more subtle than simply healing them; it's not at all clear that it has any bearing on health care provision systems as such. And it is just not true that he taught "the goodness of surrendering material wealth for the enrichment of all"; rather, he taught very different (and subtler) things about wealth itself, about the wealthy, about doing good to others, and so on - all of which took second place to an even greater commandment which you might recall. If anything, that there comes closest to what Judas advised just before he turned against Christ because his advice was rejected.

When Grand Forks was almost destroyed by a flood about ten years ago, the Fargo street preachers said it was God's judgement on the sodomites. Grand Forks (pop. ~70,000) can't be in the top five hundred American sodomy and lewdness sites, I'm sure many much smaller towns have a lot more action. (An actual sodomite who had passed through Grand Forks verified my surmise on this point).

Anyway we figured that God had slept through 8th grade geography and was really aiming at SF or NOLA, which he did hit a few years later.

Et tu, Mr. Destructo? is a politics, sports and media blog whose purpose is to tell jokes or be really right about things. All of us have real jobs and don't need the hassle that telling jokes here might occasion, which is why some contributors find it more tasteful to pretend to be dead mass murderers.